Well, apart from IE8 grinding to a halt when viewing the TAN forum leading to me swapping to Opera and the fact that it still has the deleting files bug. It's not bad, I wouldn't even try and run Vista on my home PC (2600+ XP Athlon and 1GB RAM) whereas 7 is just a tad slower than XP. I guess with tuning, it could be around the same speed. It did nearly grind to halt installing AVG though and I haven't got Office installed which I imagine would need a modern PC to run.

When you installed Windows 7 what type of connection did your HDD use? Was it SATA or IDE or something else?

I remember when I was installing Vista on this machine using the SATA connection that I needed to preload drivers in order to install Vista on the HDD. At the momment I've got the HDD set-up as AHCI. I'm hoping I won't need to do this, since hunting out Windows 7 drivers could be a problem.

You can try 2000/XP/Vista drivers. When I discovered that I hadn't got any sort of network connection, I had to plug in a wifi dongle to get connected and download everything I needed. I'm not saying it would be good for long term stability, but it worked as a quick and dirty fix.

Yeah the installation might have been easy, but the destruction afterwards has been a real pain.

I opted for dual boot; beta 7 on one SATA drive and Vista on the other. Vista detects both drives fine - Beta 7 doesn't. Sometimes my system is getting stuck at the POST, and then randomly decides to start booting again. I also had power failure a few times, but I think it's because I overloaded the MOLEX with 3 devices (2 HDD, 1 Blu-Ray drive).

Well today I was playing a game on Vista, it Blue Screened - nothing new. It tried to reboot, and then gets stuck. Strange noises emit from inside the computer case and it gets locked in a power on/off cycle before eventually splashing out a "You CPU has killed itself, please recover BIOS". So I'm left with all my old BIOS options to attempt a recovery.

After fixing them I head back in to Vista to find out what carnage has ensued. I'm expecting to find my HDD wiped, but it boots. Except for some reason ALL my drivers have been reset to "Windows will pick them for you" (even though they're years out of date). At least all my data and applications are still there, it's just a case of reinstalling every single driver.

Anyway, yeah Windows 7. It's just Vista with less "junk" and more annoying features. IE 8 has to be one of the most frustrating browsers to use ever. It crashes constantly, it keeps trying to redirect me to places I don't want to go, it keeps adding new "shortcuts" that I don't want. And then with the new taskbar at the bottom, closing tabs and windows becomes even more frustrating. Opera works fine at least, so I'm using that.

There's no support for Quad SLI yet, so I'm sitting on a single card that won't let me update the drivers. I think a card might have fried from the BIO recovery, since both Vista and beta 7 are giving similar messages. Or there's some other crazy voodoo going on in the system.

There's no official support for creative sound cards, but I managed to force some Vista ones onto the OS. So far it's not caused a crash, but then I've not tried to make it crash . My mouse isn't supported yet either, so I need to keep changing the senstivity on each boot.

Comodo firewall works if you run it in Vista compatibility mode, but I've heard removing it is a nightmare. Which is fine for me since I'll be formatting before 1st Aug anyway. It still stealths all the ports, so the firewall is working fine. No problems getting AVG to install, or Spybot; although I had to reboot to get the TeaTimer to begin working.

Any nice features in Beta 7 I like? No. I hate this new taskbar, not being able to see my currectly open windows is bad. The new "drag to the side and get half a window" feature is pathetic, resizing windows it not hard. All these new "make moving windows easier" features are annoying to use, they don't make life any easier. What is the point of the "Show desktop" thing, if I need to see my desktop I'll minimize a window thanks.

There are some good points, like the "Vista hangover" seems to have been cured. And DirectX 11 will be available (even though 10 still doesn't work!). Drivers are easy to install I guess, although I still can't get this "SM Bus Controller" to install a driver - probably unsupported hardware again. The hard disk doesn't get trashed as much as Vista thrashes HDD, so there's less "clicking".

So is there any point in getting Windows 7 when it comes out? In it's current state, if you're running XP still then the answer is "no". If you're running Vista, then yes, but be prepared for an equally annoying experience.

To sound more geeky than usual, I was reading a Marvel comic (Mighty Avengers, I think) yesterday and they made a joke at the expense of Vista. When an alien computer exploded, the reason someone suggested was "It may have been a virus, or Vista. I hear it's caused a few problems."

So then I realised finding a computer joke in a comic was a wee bit geeky.

Ebenezer Scrooge was a weak minded lightweight.
He broke after only a few hours of brainwashing!!!

Yay another test release. 5th of May for the Public, but anyone who really wants it I'm sure they can find a way to get it early .

I'll be scrubbing my current partition in preparation for this. I'm also going to take a look at Ubuntu, since when I've been going for summer placement interviews they always ask "Have you used any other OS?". But this will have to wait until after my last exam this Monday.